Stephen Errity, who has occasioned a few pieces like this, prodded me to mark 10 years since the first spark of this blog in 2008.

Talking Movies proper began on Sep 1st 2009, but April 22nd 2008 saw the staking of this claim in the digital terrain; and there is an obvious topic to hang an anniversary post on. Just over a week later the first review went up – Iron Man… 10 years later, that bloated business plan known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe is about to finally pay-off (HA!! Yeah, right…) in the shape of (The) Avengers (3): Infinity of Characters War. I will not be going to it. It’s not just that I don’t care about Thanos, of many of the other characters, or the Infinity Stones that have become a deadly serious ‘Fetch’. Marvel Studios’ omnipresence have made the last 10 years seem very long indeed, and have successfully killed off my interest in their characters, comic-book movies, and comic-books themselves. “Oopsies!”

I’ve charted my obvious decline of interest in the Marvel movies below. I saw the bold in the cinema, the italics on DVD, and the others remain unwatched.

Iron Man

The Incredible Hulk

Iron Man 2

Thor

Captain America

The Avengers

Iron Man 3

Thor 2

Captain America 2

Guardians of the Galaxy

The Avengers 2

Ant-Man

Captain America 3

Doctor Strange

Guardians of the Galaxy 2

Spider-Man

Thor 3

Black Panther

The Avengers 3

Working my way through the archives in the last week I find myself complaining over time that the Marvel movies lack the outrageous fun of Mark Millar’s comic extravaganza of these same characters, The Ultimates. I vividly remember being pedantically lectured by a bore on how audiences wouldn’t accept a scene as outré as the ultimate Millar action movie fantasy beat where Black Widow jumps from building to building and calls for a gun to be dropped from a chopper above her so she can grab it in mid-air and crash into the next building spraying bullets to save Hawkeye. Clearly, audiences wouldn’t accept this. I mean 3 movies into the MCU audiences had already accepted a bank vault being towed and used as a prehensile wrecking ball in Fast & Furious 5, and would later accept an endless runway in Fast 6, a man running up a falling truck at the same speed and so remaining in situ in Fast 7, and, oh yeah, cars driving out of one skyscraper, into another skyscraper, out of that skyscraper, and into another one. But yeah, Marvel actually adapting a panel from one of their own comics, clearly, audiences would rebel. Just as they howled in outrage and ripped up the seats when X-Men: First Class put the characters in their original yellow and blue outfits rather than the fetish leather that we were told was the only choice in 2000 because audiences wouldn’t accept those silly costumes. Oh wait, they didn’t.

In another entry in this occasional series I round up some trailers for some of next year’s most anticipated films.

Jurassic World

Jurassic Park is now a heritage title. This is like launching Jaws: Feeding Frenzy in 1997, with Jaws III in 1983 having been the last instalment. A whole generation has gone without a Jurassic Park release. They have no loving nostalgia for the original (especially its extensive model-work), or partial fondness for its sequel (“Oh yeah. Ooh, aah, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and screaming” and Spielberg’s delirious appropriation of Hitchcock’s 39 Steps scream), or bad memories of the final barely-scripted disaster. Chris Pratt’s hero seems to be combining the personae of Goldblum and Neill, which is an interesting move, and velociraptors running disinterestedly past him in their desire to escape the new hybrid dinosaur recalls a Whedon line about when scary things get scared… But, Bryce Dallas Howard’s career hasn’t lived up to her assured lead debut in The Village, and there’s a tough act to follow in Richard Attenborough’s Richard Hammond as orchestrator of the madness; not least as the swooping shots of the park (which I swear are the same as in The Hunger Games and The Phantom Menace) make plain that the original’s grounding CGI in tactile reality is passé.

The Avengers: Age of Ultron

Well this trailer carries bizarre echoes of The Dark Knight’s teaser at this time of year in 2007… Talk of how a superhero how has changed things, even if he doesn’t want to admit it, and how the supervillain will show him something – even James Spader’s voice slurs into Heath Ledger’s Joker delivery. Just like the original’s trailer, a city-wide apocalypse is some broken windows, flipped cars, and screaming people. A major let-down in The Avengers was its inability to depict an all-out onslaught, but nobody else cared – so here we go again. I found The Avengers pretty damn dull. It wasn’t the laugh-fest it was vaunted as; Guardians of the Galaxy is far funnier; it delivered only moments of memorable action, and balancing all the characters’ screen-time was tragic given that (prior to the Hulk-out) it only took flight when Robert Downey Jr was onscreen. The Person of Interest season 2 finale just aired on RTE 2, and Jonathan Nolan’s parade of awesome comic-book moments there shames not only the pedestrian Agents of Shield but also Marvel’s films which are becoming increasingly joyless as they become ever more obviously formulaic franchise-connecting CGI-laden corporate exercises.

Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens

Andy Serkis narrates some vague mumblings; because this is a teaser trailer; and the internet explodes with the idea that Benedict Cumberbatch has stowed away in the Millenium Falcon. He’s not. The internet is torn into two between the usual illiberal liberal lynch-mobs on Twitter and Star Wars fanatics trying (quite logically) to comprehend how John Boyega can be a Stormtrooper if Temuera Morrison was cloned to be the genetic exemplar for all the Stormtroopers. The prequels are no longer canon (thank God!) perhaps? All that needs to be said about the 60-second trailer is that it looks like more like a Star Wars film than the last three Star Wars films. If Abrams is throwing the prequels into the dustbin alongside every novel since 1983 it’s all to the good – the prequels showed what happens when everyone knows what happens. Indeed his own Star Trek sequel showed how paralysing the fear of total originality can be in this corporate climate. I’m still terrified that one of the big three returning characters is going to be offed as a plot point (par Blake Snyder), but I can live with threat for the pause after “and the light…” and the subsequent John Williams orchestral blast for the Millenium Falcon roaring over Tatooine. Fun has returned.